I think HBO comedian, political commentator, and talk show host Bill Maher said it best. Mr. Maher said that conservative Libertarian candidate Rand Paul is the equivalent of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin if she could make it through medical school. In an interview on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the new darling of the Tea Party movement, Mr. Paul, was asked point blank about his skepticism regarding the validity of certain components of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mr. Paul sparked controversy when he suggested to Ms. Maddow that the government had meddled too far into private enterprise with the passage of laws that were intended to put an end to America’s institutionalized racial discrimination that still permeated the country despite a series of court decisions that found racial segregation and racial discrimination wrong. Ms. Maddow gave Mr. Paul an opportunity to explain his position on the matter. But instead of making a clear statement whether or not legislation designed to help assure racial accord was appropriate when asked for a yes or no, Mr. Rand continued to do his best political dance around the issue. He did not say that he opposed any laws guaranteeing fair treatment to racial minorities. But to some dismay he clearly did not say that he supported laws that guaranteed the fair treatment of racial minorities.

If I understand Mr. Paul’s point, government should not be in the business of telling private individuals and institutions that they must open their businesses to everyone. Mr. Paul believes that a truly free society is one that allows businesses run by people who are racist or people who condone racism from their employees to pick and choose what segment of our social fabric they will do business with. A government that is intended to provide for the general welfare of the public should not be empowered to assure the equal and fair treatment of anyone. Mr. Paul says that he does not condone racism. But even though racism may be an evil in our midst, government weeding out the evil of racism is an even bigger evil.

A business does not operate free from any obligation to the entire social collective regardless if it is a sole proprietorship, a partnership, or some corporate entity given life by the stroke of some government official’s pen. Any business that operates in our communities enjoys the benefits of being part of our social collective. The roads that lead to any business and to its customers are provided by the public. The utilities that provide services to the business operate under the purview of our collective authority. The people who work in a given business are educated with our tax dollars. Even private schools operate according to parameters laid down by our social structure. A business enjoys the security of being protected from foreign entities by the United States government and its diplomatic and military machines. Any given business in our community operates under the protection of the United States economy and the value of the dollar. And although we often criticize our economic policy, our political leaders, selected by the voters, bend over backwards to protect the interest of businesses. Businesses get a lot of benefit from being part of our community.

But now, people like Rand Paul want to say that it isn’t appropriate for us to assure that businesses that enjoy the benefits of being part of our entire society keep up their end of the bargain. People like Mr. Paul want to say that businesses that reap the benefits of being in our American social structure should not be obligated to reciprocate to everyone in America. In Mr. Paul’s tolerance for racism, people should not expect equal and fair treatment from private entities that suck up public resources. It is Mr. Paul’s opinion that racism is a right that should be protected and it should not be viewed as some form of social disorder.

The freedom of business owners to deny whomever they wish a service or a product should not be given precedence over our public concept of social equality. The freedom of a business person to exercise their right to be racist should not be given precedence over our freedom to be treated fairly and our right to equal treatment.

Rand Paul can tout his tolerance for discrimination as some kind of twenty first century enlightenment against the evil of a government run amok. But the fact of the matter is that this is nothing more than old fashioned racism rearing its head and coming back strong after just a few decades of being on the down low. People are saying we have the right to be racist. That just might be true.

But our social collective not only has the right not to indulge racism, we each have an obligation to root it out call attention to it when we encounter racial discrimination or even the potential for racism. I know I like to think that I do my fair share. And today, I would like to call your attention to the racism of Rand Paul. A conservative Libertarian who would rather see blacks and other minorities discriminated against rather than see our government step up to the plate and nip racial discrimination in the bud as best it can. If Mr. Paul is elected, people all across this great nation of ours will have a hope that one day they can pull their “Whites Only” signs out of their attics or basements or garages or wherever they might have been put when our social order woke up and realized the long term impact that our tolerance for racism was causing to our national community.

Of course Mr. Paul can have his view that a truly free society must tolerate racism. He is a white man who would benefit greatly from the social conflict that comes with racism compared to how much he would actually suffer. Very few businesses would turn him and his kind away. They operate in the generic majority with control of well over ninety five percent of the resources and wealth in this country. But for racial minorities, the election of Mr. Paul and the people who support his views should be another clear sign that racism is far from over.

I wished I had recorded the name. There was a black man on CNN defending Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for his announcement designating April as Confederate History Month. The only thing the man had to say was the same tired old rhetoric about how it was good to see the other side of the story. The Confederate Army wasn’t fighting for the continuation of America’s institutionalized slavery. That was just an incidental benefit in their fight for state’s rights. If I understand their position correctly, the soldiers and supporters of the confederacy were fighting because they believed that individual states had the right and the freedom to deny black people the right to freedom.

The black man on the television thought it important to hear both sides of any argument. It is somewhat interesting that we never have to hear the other side of the story about pedophilia. No one needs to hear about the benefits of child rape or why it’s good for men to beat the shit out of women. There are just some things that are so reprehensible that there isn’t much that can be said to even attempt to begin to justify the act. There are crimes where the reasoning behind the commitment could hardly justify the crime itself.

Another rhetorical statement from the black man was the manifestation of his independent thinking. By showing his willingness to buck the trend that most black people have of turning up the nose at anything that wreaks of the confederacy or of people fighting for the right of anybody to enslave anyone, the black man was proving that he is courageous enough to do that which is unpopular. By showing his willingness to embrace the confederacy, he is proving he can think outside of the black community box.

But on the flip side, no one shows their independence by defending Germany’s Nazi Party’s attack on the Jewish community. No one sane proves their willingness to buck trends by saying that people should have the right to pick up a gun and blow the brains out of the first person they meet on the street. The independent thought processes condoning senseless murder is hardly looked upon favorably. Why does the black man feel the need to show his independence from the black community by showing his willingness to embrace the community of people who would be more than happy to allow our individual states the right to deny people their rights as human beings?

Independent thinking is so much more than just choosing an unorthodox result. If a house was on fire and everyone inside was running out to safety, no one would call the person who made a choice to stay inside the burning building an independent thinker. We would call such a person as crazy. Such behavior would never be admired or promoted. No one would label such independent action as independent thinking. In fact, considering the high possibility of injury, people would be more apt to suggest a lack of any thinking. But somehow, for some reason, we see the promotion of the black man who defends the confederacy and allow him to demonstrate his willingness to buck black community trends on CNN.

An independent thought process based on a review of information available can reach the same conclusions as people who might follow a collective decision making process. While everyone else might run out of a burning building because of the fire alarm, an independent thinker might be running out of a building because they actually see the fire. The independent thinker might be the one that causes others to take action.

Independent actions or results are hardly concrete evidence of independent thinking. In fact, it could be a sure sign that absolutely zero thinking took place at all. Such would be the case of the person who wants to show their independence by embracing a fire. The same can be said of a black person who embraces people who celebrate the ancestry of people who were fighting for the enslavement of black people whether it be a direct result of a choice to fight for the right to keep black people as white people’s property or if it is an indirect result of fighting against a federal government that just so happens to be trying to end the enslavement of black people.

The black man on the television was no independent thinker. This man was the modern equivalent of the house slave who is proud to be the one person of African descent the slave owner allows to live just one rung higher on the social ladder than the other people of African descent. Such a man is no independent thinker. He would quickly embrace whatever thinking the white man tells him. This is the type of man that would be more than happy to go inside a burning building if his master told him to do so. No independent thinking, no thinking at all, would be required.

The epitome of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The man not only preached peace, it oozed from his every orifice. When the white establishment notched up its machine of violence and oppression, when the police were wielding their batons and letting dogs maul peaceful protestors, when white men bombed black churches under the cover of darkness and killed four little black girls, when defenders of white supremacy hid in the shadows and aimed their weapons of destruction at men who only wanted equality, Dr. King’s philosophy was to love those who meant us harm. Violence was not the answer. A true man of peace would know better.

When I think of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the last thing I would think of would be a person who would condone war as a means to peace. Although it is believed that war is an unavoidable part of the human social condition, people who initiate wars, people who contribute to wars, people who escalate wars, people who dream of wars, aren’t usually thought of as Nobel Peace Prize contenders. While we might appreciate our soldiers, nobody gets the Peace Prize for their ability to kill and win wars. If that was the case, J. Robert Oppenheimer would’ve won the prize for being the father of the atomic bomb. And companies like Lockheed and Boeing would be consistent Peace Prize contenders and winners for their latest and greatest killing machine with exponentially more fire power than last year’s weapon of destruction.

Normally, the Peace Prize is aimed squarely at people who have demonstrated an unwavering objective towards peace. Dr. King preached incessantly about turning the other cheek. One has to admit, that sounds like someone who is doing their damnedest to keep the peace and is worthy of being recognized as such.

President Barack Obama is no man of peace. He has demonstrated time and time again that he has no real desire to work for an end to war. His whole response to the status quo of inequality and subjugation is to look the other way or to simply do what the majority of people want in order to keep whatever remains of his popular appeal. For a black man to become President of the United States, it wouldn’t look good if he supported the black community. These days, a President of the United States has to keep the status quo of racial inequality that is becoming more and more popular as more people try to convince everyone that racism is a thing of the past regardless of the inequality that continues to manifest. A man of peace would not be afraid to talk about inequality because a man of peace isn’t searching for status or material wealth or power or anything else that might be an impetus for war.

A man of peace does not fight a war in an oxymoronic bid for peace. A man who fights war is a man trying to kill, maim, and obliterate his opponents into silence or submission. The peace that is gained is the peace of intimidation and domination. It’s the kind of peace that a parent might gain from their child with a painful slap across the child’s face. It’s the kind of peace a man or woman gains from their significant other when he or she is aggressive and regularly uses violence to enforce their way. It is the kind of peace that comes not from understanding but from overwhelming power and an ability to conquer. A man of peace does not stand up to accept a globally recognized prize of peace with a promise to escalate war.

If Mr. Obama did not hold the key to the most destructive war machine on the face of the planet, his appetite for war would be much different. But since we have confidence in our ability to kill with utter force, we can afford to escalate hostilities on armies with only a fraction of our troops, strength, destructive capability, or our wealth. It is always far easier to escalate war against people who are poor and a people who are believed to have no redeeming values. On the other hand, a man of peace would find a way to keep guns silent and keep destruction at bay.

When the Nobel committee announced that Mr. Obama was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, many people wondered why. He had no real record to point to show that he earned such recognition. Many people thought his selection was premature. But others said that he would earn his prize with his future decisions and accomplishments.  In the aftermath of Mr. Obama’s predecessor, a man who invited those who wished us harm to engage us in conflict with the infamous words “bring’em on”, nearly anyone who replaced him would have looked like a real peace prize contender.

But today, we see exactly what kind of man was selected. Mr. Obama is a man who refers to himself as a Commander in Chief at war. In many respects, he sounds exactly like his predecessor who professed to be a man of peace as he initiated two wars. Mr. Obama professes to be a man of peace as well. And as soon as he kills the enemies of the United States, as soon as we kill everyone who does not share the values or our high minded majority, we will have the kind of peace that is attainable only through conflict. But a man of peace knows that such a peace is a temporary thing.  A true man of peace doesn’t talk about peace while keeping the world’s mightiest war machine in his back pocket.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department released twenty four year old Mitrice Richardson at an ungodly hour in the middle of the night from a remote substation. The young black woman, an executive assistant and lived with her grandmother in Los Angeles, was arrested on September 17th from an upscale restaurant in Malibu, about forty miles from her home, when she was presented with the eighty nine dollar check and couldn’t pay. The restaurant staff said she was behaving. They claim that at one point she sat at a table of six other restaurant patrons and engaged them in conversation. That’s really odd because we know people never bother to try and meet other people. And by odd behavior the staff must have been referring to the fact that she was broke. That’s certainly odd to see in a Malibu upscale restaurant. The restaurant manager had to call the police.

When the police arrived, they searched Ms. Richardson’s car and impounded it after finding a small amount of marijuana. Ms. Richardson was arrested for possession of marijuana and not paying her bill. The police took her thirteen miles away to the Malibu/Lost Hills sheriff’s station. Her car remained at the restaurant. The young woman was then released at about one o’clock in the morning, without a cell phone or her car, on her own recognizance. She had no transportation and no way to communicate with her family. That was the last time anyone actually heard or saw of her.

Now, more than a week later, the police are still trying to find her. There have been few leads in her disappearance. One resident in a neighborhood several miles away from the sheriff’s station reported seeing a woman meeting Ms. Richardson’s description sleeping on a porch that morning, but nothing else. Ms. Richardson’s parents, along with their lawyer, accuse the police Friday of inconsistencies in their reports and say that Ms. Richardson should never have been released into the middle of the night so helpless. The police created an unsafe situation and handed Ms. Richardson to someone who may have done her harm on a silver platter. The police told the parents that they didn’t operate a baby-sitting service. Police also claimed that there was no room to keep the woman at the jail. But a check of police records show that there was only one other prisoner at the jail that day between 1:30 a.m. and that afternoon. What gives?

According to a statement by Captain Thomas Martin, most of the news stories have focused on her release from custody so early in the morning. But he wants the people to know that the Sheriff’s Station personnel acted appropriately and legally during the entire event. He claims his deputies acted compassionately and did their best to find someone to pay Ms. Richardson’s bill at Geoffrey’s, the restaurant, in an attempt to avoid an arrest. Although her family offered to pay the restaurant over the phone, the restaurant said that they couldn’t process phone call charges. So I guess we’re supposed to believe that the police searched Ms. Richardson’s car thinking they might find the eighty nine dollars in the back seat cushions or something. According to Mr. Martin, when the deputies didn’t find the funds, she was placed under a citizens arrest by the restaurant management and brought to the station for booking.

Mr. Martin went on to say that while Ms. Richardson was at the station, she was allowed to use the phone to call someone to pick her up. When she was unable to find a ride home, she was afforded the opportunity to remain in our custody until morning and leave at her convenience. When she declined, she was offered the lobby for her use all night, but she declined. Once she was processed and found to have no wants or warrants they could no longer legally detain the young black woman for the two pending misdemeanor charges. Mr. Martin says that he has thoroughly examined this incident and found his personnel acted professionally, compassionately, and within the law. But he prays that Ms. Richardson will be found safe and sound.

I find it difficult to believe that the police acted with compassion or professionalism to a black woman acting strangely in one of their posh Malibu restaurants in a predominantly white area by engaging other patrons in conversation. My experience has been that a black person in a predominantly white area is seen as a nothing but trouble. A black person better make sure he or she has their Ts crossed and Is dotted, Xs slashed and Os closed if they want to avoid trouble. The last thing that black people can count on is compassion from the authorities. We’re supposed to believe that the treatment given to Ms. Richardson is some exception to the norm.

So this morning I turn on the news and I don’t hear a peep about the disappearance of Ms. Richardson even though she disappeared over a week ago. What I did hear was more news about the formerly missing Yale student Annie Le. Even though her body was found inside one of the basement walls of the medical building she worked in days ago, she still manages to garner public attention.

The only way I found out about Ms. Richardson is a hookup from Dark Frosty, a visitor to my blog who sent me to Monie on the Outside. Obviously Ms. Richardson’s story just doesn’t meet the minimum standard necessary to become a national sensation for some reason. The compassion that the deputies of Malibu are supposed to have just isn’t reflected in our national community. A missing black woman just doesn’t pique our interests. It appears that if the black community wants to get the word out about this young black woman we are going to have to do it ourselves.

Eighteen year old South African runner Caster Semenya bolted to the world’s attention when she shattered records on the track. At the African Junior Championships in Mauritius she posted the fastest 800-meter run of the year at the time with a 1:56:72. When she competed in her first senior championship at the world track and field championships in Berlin just a few days ago, she clocked another record for the year of 1:55.45 and finished two seconds ahead of the defending world champion.

The wide margin of victory against elite runners of the world added to the speculation that Ms. Semenya could be a male. Officials from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), track and field’s governing body for the world, will be conducting a gender testing procedure that includes an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a psychologist, and both internal and external physical examinations. The IAAF director of communications, Nick Davies, says that the organization does not believe Ms. Semenya has been intentionally cheating but is the victim of a medical condition known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). AIS is a condition in which a person who is genetically male but is unaffected by male sex hormones known as androgens. Some people with AIS will have a totally female body on the outside, but will lack ovaries and a uterus while others may demonstrate partial AIS and will develop more muscle mass and have more facial hair than usual.

To say that the rest of the track runners are praying for confirmation of the AIS gender malady in the test results is an understatement. Ms. Semenya literally blows away the competition with the ability to literally walk away from the rest of the pack at will. With respect to her opponents, Ms. Semenya does a very good impersonation of Jamaican sprinter and Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, who outruns his male opponents just as easily with his own record shredding performances. As a man Mr. Bolt is immune from accusations of gender confusion. No one is going to accuse him of running like a girl, not unless it’s the bionic woman.

And speaking of the bionic woman, if Ms. Semenya looked like Lindsey Wagner, who played the transistors enhanced Jaime Sommers, questions of her gender would not have been an issue. But because she does not fall into the typical standards of beauty of keen facial features and long wavy hair, it’s easy to dismiss her as nothing more than a freak of nature undeserving of her success. If she looked more like the Florence Griffith-Joyner and ran with a long flowing ponytail and sporting the latest in Cover Girl products or was a perky bundle of muscle like Dominique Dawes then we would simply call her the winner and stand in line to swoon all over her.

Instead, we hear rumors that she might be more man than woman and suddenly point to her anatomy and ask, what gives? Does she really have too much muscle mass to be a woman? Some of her competitors look just as muscular. Maybe they should have their gender checked as well. Does she really have more hair than other women? I know for a fact that nobody questioned Brooke Shields’ gender when she walked onto the scene with her bushy eyebrows. But that won’t stop these fleet footed kettles from calling Ms. Semenya black. Italian competitor Elisa Piccione said that these kinds of people should not be allowed to run with normal women. I guess by normal she doesn’t mean slower.

Instead of being celebrated as the latest great athlete, Ms. Semenya is going to be systematically taken apart and studied all the way down to her genetic level. Her twenty third chromosome will be checked for the proper pairing and she’ll be put under a variety of technologically advanced microscopes so some of us can examine her every defect. Some of the test that she’ll be subjected to will be arbitrary and based on somebody’s opinion of what it means to be male or female. Seriously, what can a psychologist contribute to the understanding of this runner’s gender? The only reason she’s going in for psychological testing is that she did her best to win a race.

If this woman is going through a battery of tests simply because she won a race then maybe it should become standard procedure for all women who win a race to have their gender checked and their psyche scrutinized for their every Freudian flaw. Why stop there? Let’s avoid embarrassing the winners and the rest of the runners altogether by checking their femininity when they sign up before they run. But to wait until women like Caster Semenya are in the middle of experiencing their highest high, after they have put their best effort forward with astonishing results, after they have played by all the rules, while they’re steep in the middle of overwhelming emotions, to single them out for further testing simply because they won and don’t fit our expectations of how a woman should appear and act is some serious loser like behavior.

Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested!  One of the most respected African scholars in America was arrested.  What prompted his arrest?  Mr. Gates was trying to break into his own home.  He was having trouble with his front door.  And like some people who get locked outside their own home, Mr. Gates decided to get in right then and there the best way he can.

According to the news report, somebody saw a black man trying to break into a house.  The police made a visit to the house.  By the time the police showed up Mr. Gates was inside the house.  He was asked to provide proof of his identity and proof that he lived there.  Mr. Gates produced a driver’s license and his university identification.  But then what happened dissolves into a case of his side, their side, and the truth.

The police say that Mr. Gates became belligerent.  Imagine that!  Mr. Gates arrives from an overseas trip from China, a pretty good distance and a very considerable amount of time away, only come home to find his front door stuck and he has to force himself into his own home.  Shortly thereafter, the police are knocking at his door asking him to prove he owns his house.  It isn’t hard to believe that he was upset.  Dude was probably tired.  Instead of the police recognizing an angry man in his own home, the police want the respect from a black man that they feel that they are due.  Since the police didn’t get their props from Mr. Gates, they felt it was in the best interest of the Cambridge community to pull Mr. Gates out of his house and book him on charges that amount to being angry.

The spokesperson for the Cambridge police says that mistakes were made on both sides of this issue.  As is the custom when confronting black people, the police made the mistake of following the standard procedure of throwing any and all forms of compassion out the window in favor of the heavy hand of law.  On the other hand, Mr. Gates made the mistake of being a black man and thinking he was entitled to be angry on his own property.  Both sides have made key mistakes.

Mr. Gates is only the latest black man to be hauled off to jail or harassed by police for being accused of having a bad attitude.  And contrary to what a lot of people would like to believe, this is far from being an isolated incident.  I was listening to people making their comments during a program on the radio and a lot of white people were recalling their stories with police.  How come when they were harassed by police it wasn’t racist but this case was?  What makes Mr. Gates’ arrest different?

Off the top of my head I would say that none of the stories told were about police coming into their homes and arresting people when no crime was committed.  I would say that the fact that Mr. Gates identified his self and had proven that he was entitled to be in his house.  After such a long trip, it’s pretty reasonable to think that Mr. Gates was cranky.  Add a stuck door to the picture and it’s easy to believe that he’d be pissed.  Put cops on top of that and I could see him being angry.  But Mr. Gates has no criminal record and has a history of being a good citizen.  The fifty eight year old man is an asset to the community.  But good behavior doesn’t buy much these days.

Unless he had threatened somebody the police should’ve simply walked away.  But instead of allowing good judgment to prevail, the police felt that whatever damage their egos suffered from Mr. Gates’ anger required compensation.  A black man needs to have more respect for the agents of law.

People are entitled to their anger.  As a social collective we are told that our children are entitled to be angry with their parents, we are told that spouses are entitled to be angry with their significant other, some of us believe that we are entitled to give god the middle finger if we are so moved.  But then on the flip side of these anger management coins, many of us think that the lines of anger that are so crossable in other areas of our lives must be held fast and strong lest black people lose their proper regard for law enforcers.

Instead of people seeing this incident as the latest manifestation of the collective disrespect for black people, people want to sweep it all under the rug as nothing more than an unfortunate misunderstanding between two parties who both contributed to a series of mistakes being made that resulted in the harassment of another black person.  This was just another one of those cases where cops are too quick to trample the rights of a high profile black citizen by mistaking him for the typical black person without the resources to call attention to their abuse, and a case of a black man forgetting his place in our social structure.

A coworker came by my desk to give me the news.

Hey Peacemaker, have you heard?
Heard what?
Farrah Fawcett died today.
Oh yeah, I heard about it a little while ago when I was listening to NPR.
So did you hear the other part?
The other part?  What’s that?
Michael Jackson had a heart attack and stopped breathing.
Over Farrah Fawcett???

And then I noticed other people in the office were having their own version of the same conversation in the cubes nearby and throughout the office. Michael Jackson was dead. Farrah picked a hell of a day to kick the bucket. The last thing a self important person like Ms. Fawcett needed was to be upstaged by the death of Michael Jackson. I went back to work.

It might be sad to say but I really could not care any less. Michael Jackson was the very worst example of a black person who really hated being black. While most self hating black people would be content to simply say that they have transcended race, Michael Jackson was the one black person that actually decided to do something about it. Michael Jackson stared at the man in the mirror and decided he didn’t like what he saw enough to buy a new white skin tone, a keen nose that stayed on his face most of the time, thin lips, and a drippy jerry curl to exorcise the kinkiness of his natural hair and eventually just had it permed straight and long. This was not a person happy about being black or who wanted to embrace his blackness. Mr. Jackson ran from being black in front of the entire world to see. Being black was much too painful for him to live with.

What is sad for me is that I loved Michael Jackson just as much as anyone else. Who didn’t? Who didn’t love to hear Michael Jackson sing? And I’m sure there were people who didn’t, but to hell with them. Everybody knew this was a seriously talented young black boy. The dude was crooning like a troubadour at five years old. Who shows that kind of natural talent just months after kicking their diapers to the curb? What was there not to like and admire? No doubt the boy was singing about things he truly didn’t understand. But his voice was so strong, so controlled, with such a good range, and so full of emotion that he could give you the impression that he knew exactly what he was singing about when he was singing songs like Got To Be There and Mama’s Pearl and I’ll Be There.

When Michael broke the stranglehold grip of Berry Gordy and Motown, he truly hit the stratosphere of stardom. Off the Wall, produced under the talented tutelage of Quincy Jones and released under the Epic label, was a phenomenal success for a debut album. And although the cracks were beginning to form in his blackness, his Motown roots were shining through.  The songs were soulful modern interpretations of the songs Michael Jackson grew up singing with his brothers. And we all would be talking about Off the Wall to this day if it wasn’t for the even more spectacular success of his follow up album Thriller. Thriller broke just about every record when it was released. But by now Michael’s true colors began to show and black was not one of them.

On a daily basis Michael Jackson got weirder and weirder. And his music started to suffer as well. You use to be able to sing to a Michael Jackson tune. You could snap your fingers and bob your head as you sang Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough or Rock With You. But I couldn’t sing some of his latest stuff if you held a gun to my head. Michael stopped making the kind of music you wanted to hear and focused on the kind of music that had to be performed with a killer iconic dance move. For sure Michael Jackson’s name is associated with some of the most famous dance moves of all time. Everybody remembers the moonwalk and the robot associated with the song Dancing Machine. Everybody liked to see him spin in place like an ice skater doing a pirouette. But the new music began to take a backseat to the new dance moves on the stage and the songs became impossible to simply listen to or sing with over the radio.

The music that made Michael Jackson famous evaporated along with his blackness. The new hybrid Michael Jackson that looked more like a scarecrow from a Japanese anime and his accompanying music could never compete with the older version. And instead of being content to let his greatness lie in the past the King of Pop kept trying to recreate a new phenomenon based on superficial glitz and glamour instead of what really drove his initial success, the raw talent and the music.

Yes it is sad to hear that Michael Jackson died. But the fact of the matter is that to me, the Michael Jackson I came to know and love died a long time ago. The caricature that took the talented Michael Jackson’s place has finally died as well. Maybe in his death he’ll get the peace he appeared to never have had in life. I will miss the Michael Jackson I fell in love with. I will miss the Michael Jackson that I thought I could identify with as an obvious member of the black community. However, I will confess that I will not miss the man that became better known as the King of Pop.

Rest in peace Michael Jackson.

Someone asked what has the Democrats done for the black community? It is an interesting question to which I really don’t have a good answer. I know that the Democratic Party is more apt to increase minimum federal wages. But I would be hard pressed to identify anything that the Democratic Party has done that really helps the black community.

Then again, I’m hard pressed to point to anything that the Republican Party has done to help the black community lately. The party of Lincoln stood back while a hurricane obliterated the poor black community in New Orleans. I know that the conservative judges appointed to the Supreme Court by the party of the conservatives have given institutions directly opposed to racial diversity and opponents of affirmative action the benefit of judicial decisions that support their arguments regardless of how unsubstantiated reverse discrimination might be. It should be apparent that the party of Reagan supports the heavy handed approach of law enforcement and zero tolerance for people suspected of breaking the law in the black community but look the other way for similar or even worse behavior. While governor of Texas George W. Bush would condemn a man convicted of murder to his fate with the electric chair despite the lack of hard evidence that supports the conviction, but would turn around and start not one but two wars that have our soldiers paying with their lives in order to “protect America’s freedom”. I guess the freedom not to lose one’s life in an illegal and unjustified war isn’t one of those protections our soldiers are fighting for.

I know that the Republican Party, heavily influenced by the big players in the oil industry, is more likely to sit back and let Exxon-Mobile or Texaco earn billions of dollars of profit in a week’s time while the public goes broke paying three dollars a gallon for oil in the off season. And then these people look dumbfounded when the country falls headlong into a recession with a serious depression right behind. I know this is the party that is more likely to deregulate an industry so that their profits can go through the roof while the quality of service and products plummets. I know this is the party that could have corrected the sub prime mortgage mess before it became the bane of the global community but instead decided to let market forces get out of hand. As long as the president’s scope of understanding was limited to individuals losing their homes their attitude was that the whole problem could be fixed with people exercising a little personal responsibility. Who cares about a few dominoes falling? But now that the chain of dominoes has gained speed and has spread to infect the global community and now that we hang on the cusp of financial ruin we can spend the money necessary to correct this much bigger problem. A stitch, in time, would have saved the country hundreds of billions, maybe even in the trillions, of dollars.

I guess in the end the question isn’t so much as to what has the Democratic Party done for the black community. I think what is more pertinent is what has the Republican Party done to the black community. Neither party has done much for the benefit of the black community. Nothing much has happened for the black community since the sixties. But turn the question around and ask which party is likely to do the worst damage to the black community. The answer should pop right out at you like eyeballs in the dark in a caricature of the first black president.

Sherri Goforth, an administrative assistant to Republican State Senator Diane Black of Tennessee, thought it was appropriate and even humorous to distribute a racist image that shows all the Presidents of the United States in official like portraits with the lone exception of the first black president as nothing but a pair of round eyeballs standing out against an all black background. Ms. Goforth confessed that she sent the email to the wrong list of people. The implication is that there is a right list of people who should have received the image.

Of course people have defended the image. I actually read somebody comment that nowhere is it written that it is an image of President Obama, just implied. I guess that makes it okay. I guess that was supposed to be an image of any generic black man in a picture with all the presidents instead of the first black president. That makes sense.

This is on top of former state election director Rusty DePass of South Carolina issued an apology for his comments linking an escaped gorilla from the Riverbanks Zoo with the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama. Of course, people defended his racism saying that Ms. Obama believed in evolution so she must believe that the primate was related. And on top of that, Mike Green, an employee with Lexington Republican consulting firm Starboard Communications apologized for an online joke about President Barack Obama taxing aspirin because it’s white and it works.

The era of post racism is getting off to a seriously rocky start. A lot of people want to say that these are nothing more than isolated incidents. But I’m more apt to think that this is a much more realistic example of the true condition of race relations when the mask of political correctness falls away. And these examples are from people who have more than the usual influence on the mechanisms of government. Is it any wonder why we continue to scratch our collective heads in confusion trying to figure out why the state of the black community is in such relatively dismal condition? When people have such contempt for the first black president is there any doubt that there would be contempt for black people in general?

A couple days ago I had a dream.  I was walking through a house with my family.  But across the yard there was an abandoned house.  I crossed the yard to the empty home.  When I walked inside the house and looked outside the window, the previously empty yard I walked through had a few trees with black people hanging from the limbs.  Thinking I was seeing ghosts I ran back outside.  But the vision didn’t go away.  There were even more black people hanging from the trees.  They were not hanging from a noose around the neck.  They were upside down with their feet tied together and arms outstretched to the earth.  As I tried to walk back to my family, I saw a white man in white robes looking like the pope sentencing more black people to their deaths.  I woke from my dream after that. I spent the rest of that day, and the next, thinking of our African ancestors.

Today is the day that Americans are supposed to spend in remembrance of our fallen ancestors who were drafted or volunteered to serve this country and paid the ultimate sacrifice to help make this country great. I think more of us ought to spend more time remembering all the unremembered enslaved ancestors who were forced at the end of a whip to serve this country and make it great without so much as a dime in compensation. Where is our national memorial to recognize the sacrifice of all the enslaved Africans and all the Africans who died in the middle passage?

I just suffered a dialog with someone of limited intellect about the impact of racial discrimination on the black community. There was a comment in my inbox about an article I wrote two years ago describing my theory of how America’s institutionalized slavery back in its infancy laid the foundation for the relationship between the black community and the racially generic dominant community that is predominantly white. I should have known the exchange wouldn’t be a good when I read the first sentence.

“You all need to suck it up and deal with the present, black people have not been enslaved in this country for a very long time…”

For the record we all agree that America’s institutionalized slavery is a thing of the past. The culture that considered black people little more than white people’s property is done. However, its sister culture, the culture that protects white privilege and superiority at the expense of the black community is alive and well.

When the institutionalized enslavement of black people came to its long overdue end, the dominant community didn’t turn to the black community and welcomed black people with open arms as equals. The dominant community continued to subject the black people to a perpetual condition of disenfranchisement. It started with denying black people humanity and it has continued with denying black people educational and employment opportunities.

The alienation of black people’s inalienable constitutional rights led to a condition of disparity that has persisted ever since black people were introduced to America as a lower life form to be bought and sold by the highest bidder. The enslavement of black people wasn’t the issue when people were putting signs in windows saying only white people were entitled to goods or services. The enslavement of black people wasn’t the issue when people were saying that separate facilities for black people were fair. The enslavement of black people wasn’t the issue when black people were fighting for civil rights. And yet, some people insist on trying to undermine any conversation about racial disparity that persist today with arguments that slavery ended years ago so black people need to just suck it up and deal with it.

I saw a report the other day that said that unemployment has reached a thirty year high of more than 8.5 percent. But while the white community has to suffer with a rate of about 7.9 percent, the black community has to deal with an unemployment rate of 13.4 percent. There was another report that said on a per capita basis, for each dollar of wealth owned by the white community, the black community has ten cents. The black community controls less than two percent of the wealth of the white community. And some people find this disparity tolerable because slavery ended so many years ago.

Regardless the reason we have a condition of disparity between the black and white communities. And instead of people having compassion for the black community, black people constantly hear attitudes that can be accurately summarized as “fuck you”. All too often people in America have more compassion for a rabid dog that needed to be put down than they would have for any child in the black community.

Whenever the idea that America should take steps to remedy the substandard conditions in the black community, it is inevitable that someone will perceive it as a free ride for black people. People from the dominant community will say that black people don’t deserve help because slavery ended years ago or black people sold Africans to the Europeans so Americans are absolved and don’t have to do anything today. Black people don’t want to work hard and black people are just bad people.

But the truth is that it doesn’t matter why the black community needs help. The fact of the matter is that the black community needs help. America stands ready to send a trillion dollars and well over four thousand American lives to fight and die in Iraq. But make the suggestion that America should invest in the black community and people’s ass get so tight that you’d need a shoehorn to squeeze a dime through their cheeks.

Black people in America have never deserved any help, black people don’t deserve any help, and black people will never deserve any help. It wouldn’t matter if a hurricane came and flooded an entire city. Black people would rot in the sun before America would do anything to help. That’s just the way it was, it is, and will ever be. Black people just need to learn to suck it the fuck up.

I just saw the dash cam video.  Officer Robert Powell chased a black family to a local hospital after he witnessed their vehicle running a red light with the hazard lights on.  The black people get out of the car.  The black woman is distressed.  She is in tears.  The police officer draws his gun and tells everyone to stay put.  The woman tells the police officer that her mother is about to pass away.  The officer doesn’t care.  After trying to explain the situation and seeing that she was getting nowhere with the law enforcer, she holds up her hands, tells the cop that she’s going into the hospital,  and goes into the emergency room.

The black man remains outside.  The police officer wants to see his documentation of insurance.  The black man is trying to tell the officer his mother in law is dying.  The cop assures the man he can go after he gets the proper documentation.  The man is frantic and starts looking for it.  The police officer tells the man that he either finds his documentation or the vehicle will be towed away.  The black man asks for understanding.  The police officer tells the man to shut up and submit with a threat of violence or harassment.  A nurse comes outside to explain to the cop that they only have minutes before the man’s mother in law passes away.  The cop didn’t care.  Another cop shows up to help alleviate the situation.  The other police officer is looking at the situation through unbiased eyes.  He tries to tell the original police officer that he should let the man go inside the hospital.  The original police officer says he’s almost done.  The black man gets a ticket for running the red light.  The black man goes inside the hospital just in time to hear that his mother in law passed away while he was being harassed by the uncaring police officer.

People are shocked to witness so much callousness to the black family by a police officer.  More humane treatment is given to feral cats and other homeless animals.  A statement from Dallas police said that police officers have wide discretion to respond to a situation.  The police officer had the option to drop the entire issue.  He could’ve waited while the black family said goodbye to their loved one and then issued the ticket.  He could’ve issued the ticket and let the family go about their business of saying goodbye.  But this dick weed’s panties were so tightly wadded that he felt he had to get out of the police car with his weapon in order to lay down the law.  Just what exactly did he think people were doing speeding to the hospital in the middle of the night and getting out of a car so emotionally distraught?  It never crossed the man’s mind that something out of the ordinary may be happening.  Instead of being helpful and serving the community, the police officer made the choice to be the biggest racist prick he could be.  Knowing the situation in detail I would be surprised if a traffic judge didn’t throw the case out.

How do we know he was being racist?  We don’t exactly know for sure.  The man never made a statement that he hates black people or that he would be willing to shoot a black family as they tried to say goodbye to a family member on their death bed.  But can anyone recall the last time we heard about a white family being chased into a hospital parking lot, got out of their car distressed, and is accosted by a police officer with a gun drawn?  This might be one of those rare, first time ever cases.  But why is it that when it’s the first time happening it happens to a black family?

Actually, this isn’t the first time something like this happened.  Black people are often the victim of overzealous law enforcers.  The only reason the egregiousness of this situation is coming to the light is because the black man involved was Houston Texans football player Ryan Moats.  Enough people care about Mr. Moats to make sure this police officer pays for following standard black suspect operating procedure and using his position of authority to wreak havoc.  Mr. Moats has the resources or has enough friends in high places to eek out some retribution for his family’s ordeal.  Officer Powell has been fired.  However, even in this economic environment I’m sure he won’t remain unemployed for long.  People who abuse black people often find support from the dominant community and wind up with even better career paths.  Just ask Don Imus or Duane “Dog” Chapman.

But had that been me, a black nobody with few friends and none of them in high places, we would have heard a totally different story.  Who am I kidding?  You wouldn’t hear any story because it would have never made the news.  All we would have heard is that a black man on his way to hospital ran a stop light and while he was getting his ticket his loved way passed away.  More than likely the outpouring of sympathy for Mr. Moats would be replaced with a cavalier attitude of Mr. Peacemaker should have obeyed traffic laws if he didn’t want trouble.  People would have defended Mr. Powell and his job would have never been in jeopardy.  The man was just another nigger that needed a reminder of his place in this world.

No one should flaunt traffic laws.  But if the police officer was dead set on issuing a traffic citation, it could have and should have been done quickly considering the extenuating circumstances.  But too often we dismiss the circumstances when everyday black people are the subject and assumptions are made.  If we actually took justice for black people seriously, if we took equal protection under the law seriously, if we actually took consideration for all people seriously, no police officer would have the audacity to be so nonchalant with the threat of violence.  How many more times does this kind of thing need to happen before we realize there is a problem of disparity with our police culture?

The perpetual quest for balance is a beautiful fact of nature. No offense, but not even the best blind quadriplegic juggling tight-rope walker could hope to match nature’s juggling act if even for an instant. On this planet, nature has produced an ecological system that can perpetually sustain a wide variety of plant and animal life. If our very limited perspective of the planets and moons within our solar system and the other heavenly bodies in our galaxy is any indication Earth is a remarkable achievement of balance.

Although balance does not necessarily mean consistent, we experience day and night, hot and cold, water and land, rain and sun, and a number of other things within a relatively tight range of variance. There are virtually an unlimited number of factors and variables for each and every component of nature’s formula.

Within this ecosystem, and without exception, nothing natural is allowed to work out of balance with respect to its environment. While a forest fire may look like nature is out of balance, at least temporarily, it has been determined that the forest fire is actually a very natural and vital piece of the forest’s natural cycle. While obviously destructive, the fire gives the forest an opportunity to reset and rejuvenate. Anything that may have been out of synch with its surroundings has been destroyed and given a new opportunity to stake out its piece of the ecological landscape. While we may see the charred, blackened results of a forest fire as disparaging, it is vital for keeping the forest healthy and in balance.

Our African and Native American ancestors knew that the key to life was balance. They lived in harmony with their environment. Significant inequalities were not allowed to exist within the community. Our ancestors knew that a strong and healthy community was only as strong as its individual members. Any significant weaknesses in the community threatened the survival of the whole. Everything and everyone were kept in balance with each other, with the environment, and with nature.

Unfortunately, there is little in the development of the western culture that allows people to live in balance with our environment or with each other. As the model of a culture run amok the United States consist of nothing if not imbalance. By far the richest country in the world people in the United States enjoy the highest standard of living ever dreamed while others suffer the nightmare of some of the worst poverty on the planet. With the significant imbalances in our economic system come significant imbalances in other systems such as education, housing, justice, employment, medical care, government representation, or whatever you may wish to consider.

What is sad is the fact that the United States spends more money on maintaining these woefully inequitable systems than other countries spend for theirs with far more superior results. Countries like Venezuela and Cuba have made commitments to universal healthcare for all of its citizens and they spend a tiny fraction of the money the United States spend. In America many enjoy medical coverage as a benefit of their employment. But for too many people are living without adequate medical coverage. And the numbers continue to grow each and every year as more and more companies seek to improve their profitability by minimizing or even eliminating their healthcare cost through various means. The imbalance in our healthcare continues to grow.

Chief executive officers in American conglomerates have some seriously steep pay salaries. It is nothing to hear the head of a multinational is being paid an eleven figure a year salary while they run their company into the ground and layoff hourly workers by the thousands. According to a labor study conducted by the AFL-CIO, in the United States the ratio between executive pay and hourly pay was about $42 to $1 in the year 1980. In 1990 the ratio had swelled to $85 to $1. In the year 2000 the number had increased to $531 to $1. By comparison, the average ratio for an executive to labor payout in countries like Japan and Germany is more like $20 to $1. The imbalance in financial systems continues to grow.

Today it has become natural for the haves and the have nots to mutually exist. While one continues to thrive in comfort the other continues to thrive in numbers. Like a cancer the inequalities of western culture will continue to grow. And like a cancer the inequalities of a social system running out of control will eventually effect and pervert other social system that appear to be in healthy balance. And like a cancer inequalities must be aggressively attacked in order to restore balance. Unfortunately it may be far too late for balance to return to western culture. Nothing short of a cataclysm on the scale of the forest fire may restore our equilibrium.

Without an equivalent of the forest fire to completely destroy the current arrangement the inequalities of our social systems will continue to grow. History backs this supposition. When people were starving in France while they king ate cake the French revolution became a fire that swept over the country and caused change. When the inequalities of corruption were rampant in Cuba the fire of the 26th of July Movement swept through the country and made change. Who knows what degree of utopia would have been the result if the United States had not enacted an embargo around the island country to exact some fiscal revenge. Japan suffered serious change at the end of World War II. The United States made sure Japan enacted change that benefited the entire Japanese people. Germany and the rest of Europe went through change in the World War II.

Change came for it could not be stopped. Change will come, it cannot be stopped. The perpetual existence of imbalance cannot be tolerated. Nature demands harmony.

“President Obama your agenda is not new it is not change and it is not hope. Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion.” – Rush Limbaugh

Actually, I believe a lot of people are pinning a lot of hope that Mr. Obama is able to change things. With extreme economic conditions that have been inherited from the previous administration that spent the last eight years trying to stimulate the economy with massive tax cuts and uncontrolled spending and deregulation, the global economy has been dragged into conditions of unprecedented financial collapse. Unfettered capitalism has seen a lot of people get richer while the larger share of the population stagnate or even economically regress.

In order to compensate for salaries and wages that cannot compete with the ever increasing cost of living, most turned to whatever credit mechanism they could find. You could borrow against your house, your car, your future earnings, your future equity, your name, somebody else’s name, and whatever else you can think of. That bubble of credit has collapsed and like the individual who has borrowed and can’t pay it back, America the collective has borrowed and now we cannot pay it back.

In this economic environment we are spending a lot of money on helping corporations survive. A lot of people say these corporations are too big to fail. In order to save the economy we have to give various financial institutions billions and billions of dollars to keep them solvent. The same people would rather cut off an arm than give a dime to a manufacturer that employs union labor and blue collar jobs. While financial institutions are too big to fail, the individual is too small to help. It’s okay that corporations earn record profits per month while individuals struggle to keep their budgets intact paying record prices for food, fuel, healthcare and just about anything else you can think of.

For years we have seen healthcare cost balloon despite our less than best efforts to control healthcare cost. We were told that the problem with health insurance is that the courts want to punish doctors and health providers for malpractice. Tort reform would save insurers money which would save doctors money which would save the individual money. Yet, even in the states where tort reform has significantly limited malpractice liabilities, healthcare costs continue to rise while health insurers continue to earn eye popping profits.

I think the unlimited potential for earning near unimaginable profit is the largest problem here. It’s easy to say the problem is greedy lawyers or the problem is greedy corporations or the problem is greedy so and so. But the root problem in all circumstances is the need to feed greed and how we want to protect that need at the cost of our community.

We can implement more band aids to dodge the root problem. We can implement electronic medical record systems and other such nonsense in order to minimize cost. The system is more efficient which means people who use to do the labor intensive work of maintaining medical records will lose their jobs and lose their health coverage. And the cycle starts all over again. How will these newly unemployed people maintain the cost of their medical coverage?

Nevertheless, people who think that a new nationwide electronic medical recording system is going to reign in medical cost are akin to people who joust with windmills. People refuse to acknowledge the real problem of people wanting profit. There is no magic bullet. We are either going to become more socially responsible and create a system that allows all of us to benefit, or we are going to allow people to continue the practice of transferring wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich who want to build the zeroes in their bank accounts on the backs of people just trying to get by.

It is this environment that will lead to the development of a more socially aware culture where everyone has access to healthcare, educational opportunities, and a minimum of what’s needed to get by. Some people call this socialism. They say the word as if it’s a curse from the deepest pit of perdition. But if people will actually take a moment to think about what socialism means, how these days a lot of people need help to get back to where we were, we would realize it is not the blight we have been programmed to think it is.

More people are more comfortable with allowing our government to spend our collective hard earned tax dollars to develop cutting edge, state of the art, nuclear weapon delivery systems with accuracy that can ram a forty megaton bomb up a bee’s ass rather than develop a health care network that would assure everyone, even the homeless, adequate health services. That doesn’t sound very compassionate at all. In fact, it sounds very negative, destructive, and diabolical. Something is very wrong with that picture.

And this is the picture that we are now beginning to see. Now that the fog of consumption for the sake of consumption is being lifted, we should take a moment to realize our priorities. To continue business as usual and pretend that everything is okay while the rich continue to get richer, the poor continue to get poorer, healthcare cost rising everyday, the list of preexisting conditions grows longer with just about each and every claim, fuel cost getting out of hand, and global conglomerates laying people off on a daily basis as they scour the globe for the cheapest labor available, is madness. Logic says we should be at the very beginning of a long overdue cultural revolution.

Unfortunately, not everyone is onboard with this idea. People who are doing well, who are able to provide for their families, who have the resources to do anything their heart desires because they are one of the few sitting at the top of the wealth accumulation pyramid that represents America. It is no wonder such a selfish person would promote the status quo and hatred for more socially responsible policies. Despite the fact that many people need help in this environment, doing anything to help more people afford to do more for his/her self is perceived as the horror of horrors. Some refer to it as a transfer of wealth.

But the news flash is that we’ve been living under a system of wealth transfer for years. It’s just that it goes from the poor to the rich. A lot of people are hoping that this system that continues to exclusively look out for the rich and the well to do will come to an end. I know I do. I hope Mr. Obama tears down the walls of economic exclusion so that this economic system opens up so that all can benefit. That would be the greatest act of compassion in a very long time.

Some have interpreted a New York Post cartoon as comparing President Barack Obama to the fed up chimpanzee that went berserk and was gunned down by police drew criticism from racially sensitive civil rights leaders, elected officials, and others who said the cartoon reflected racist stereotypes of blacks people as monkeys and lower primates by people in the dominant community. The cartoon by Sean Delonas refers to the chimpanzee that was killed by police in Stamford, Connecticut, after it mauled a friend of its owner. Some added the fact that the cartoon suggests that Mr. Obama should be or would be assassinated. Some urged a boycott of the New York Post and the companies that will continue to advertise in it without voicing some kind of outrage.

Civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton described the cartoon as troubling given the history of racist attacks on the black people as being synonymous with monkeys. T-shirts portraying Obama as the children’s book character Curious George, a monkey, made occasional appearances among audience members at Republican rallies during last year’s election campaign, and a similar stuffed doll continues to be advertised online.

However, Col Allan, editor-in-chief of the Post, defended the work saying, “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.”

Maybe Mr. Sharpton is doing nothing but looking for more work because issues of racial disparity have shriveled up like the rest of the economy. But if the American people would take a more sensitive approach towards matter of race then we wouldn’t have this problem. Instead, so many people want to excuse even the most disgusting forms of racial insensitivity as just a prank or a joke or a private matter.

In the recent past we’ve seen people come out the woodwork to defend the bounty hunter who refers to his son’s black girlfriend as little more than a gold digging nigger out to take everything the bounty hunter has worked for. We’ve seen people come out to defend senators who stand in front of campaign rallies who point to the lone black person in crowd and very publicly used a racial slur in reference to the minority to a roar of applause. People defend white students hanging nooses off of school trees as little more than fun loving scamps. People jump to the defense of the talk radio program host who refers to black women as nappy headed ho’s. And people jump out of this same woodwork to defend portrayals of Mr. Obama as a derivative of Curious George because it is nothing more than the nature of the political campaign beast.

And that’s just the recent racial disparity that we tolerate. There are years, decades, even centuries of racial disparity, racial hypocrisy, racial subjugation, racial inequality, racial caricatures, and so much more that constantly portrays black people as the inferior of white people. We’ve gone through entire eras of institutionalized slavery, Jim Crow laws, separate but far from equal, white only conveniences and facilities, and a very long list of etcetera.

Because we as a national collective choose to avoid issues of race we can never meet the challenges of our racial dysfunction that continues to percolate beneath the surface. Black people can deal with a lack of education and employment and the like. For years, black people have dealt with issues of foreclosure and the lack of employment in the black community. But as soon as these conditions hit the broader, racially generic dominant community so thoroughly controlled by white people then we have to have a stimulus package. What’s good enough for the black goose is never good enough for the white gander.

If we were to ever make an honest, concerted effort to confront our racism head on we could perhaps get to a point where people wouldn’t feel so free to wear their racist fueled social impairment on their proverbial sleeves and others would not feel the need to wear a racially charged chip on the shoulder.

Unfortunately, to even make the suggestion that we should take the time to confront this issue as a nation of people with a common goal for a better future is to invite ridicule. Mr. Obama said as much last year when he gave his first speech to distance himself from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Mr. Obama’s call for racial healing was met with derision from people like ultra conservative Pat Buchanan who responded that black people should be on their knees thanking white people for our perpetual state of racial inequality. And true to form, people from the dominant community defend other people from the dominant community who defend the racial disparity of the status quo.

I have to confess that when I saw then Illinois Senator Barack Obama snub the 2008 State of the Black Union program hosted by Tavis Smiley and Tom Joyner, I saw it as a bad omen for the black community.  However, the fact that Michael Steele, the black Republican and former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, took the time to make an appearance was an even worse sign of things to come.

Mr. Obama couldn’t appear to be too connected to the black community because as a national collective we have an overwhelmingly strong need to see any positive affiliation from a black politician with the black community as being too black to be good for everyone.  Mr. Obama has to keep his distance.  And people justify this behavior by saying Mr. Obama wasn’t going to be the president of black America, but the president of all of America.  However, Mr. Obama’s various appearances in front of more generic and therefore more predominantly white organizations were never dismissed as him trying to be the president of white America.  The contrast is pretty stark.

But the Republican Mr. Steele wasn’t under any such constraint.  Mr. Steele could do whatever he thought appropriate to sell the idea of the Republican Party to the predominantly black audience.  I have to admit that from what I can remember of the program, Mr. Steele’s appearance on the show was smooth.  He was somewhat conciliatory over the fact that the Bush administration never bothered to make much of an effort to mend its relationship with the black community.  But regardless, Mr. Steele made a point to say that the black community needs to stay vigilant with any and all levels of government from the local to the national.  It was a pretty good performance for Mr. Steele who downplayed his affiliation with conservatives.

At the time, one black politician was working to distance himself from the black community.  The black vote was in the bag so his focus was to appeal to others.  The other black politician was working to minimize his affiliation with the others.  Black people don’t vote his party’s affiliation so he had to spend his focus appealing to black people.

From there, Mr. Obama went on to become the nominee for president from the Democratic National Committee.  Mr. Steele went on to stand in front of the Republican National Committee, working the virtually all white crowd with frenzied refrains of drill baby drill.  Gone was the rather agreeable Mr. Steele at the State of the Black Union.  Hello Mr. Steele the passionate representative of politically conservative ideologies.  No black people in the house?  That’s okay because at the end of this Republican politician’s day all that matters is drill baby drill.  The conditions of the black community didn’t even register for they’re not really all that important.  All the Republican Party wanted was to siphon off a greater percentage of black votes in order to win more political offices.

From there, Mr. Obama went even further and became the first black president of the United States.  His popularity rivals the best of any brand new president.  People are putting a lot of faith into his administration after dealing with the disappointments of his predecessor for so many years.  People may not believe in their federal government, but at least they are willing to give Mr. Obama the benefit of a doubt at the moment.  Mr. Obama enjoys so much of the public’s goodwill that a lot of people have become rather sensitive to some of the tactics people play on people of color.  Which leads to somewhat of a dilemma, what would be the best way to take down a popular black president?

Mr. Steele went further as well.  He is now the leading figurehead of the Republican Party, an organization that is for the most part void of black participants.  Another contender for this title fell by the wayside after his rather juvenile attempts at humor at the expense of racial sensitivity went over so well.  People should note that distributing CDs with such hits as Barack the Magic Negro does little to create a sense of racial inclusion.  And another contender for the title decided enough was enough and the time had finally come to cancel his membership at his exclusively white country club after enjoying years of rubbing elbows in an environment that mimicked a Republican Party convention.  The odds for Mr. Steele’s selection got better with each passing day.

But nevertheless, it is no mere coincidence that an organization so empty of black people selects a black man as their front man when the main opponent in their struggle for political aspirations is a wildly popular black president.  When there’s a raging fire you fight fire with fire.  When there’s a popular black president you fight black with black.  Don’t want to take a chance of appearing too racist talking about Mr. Obama’s weaknesses?  Get a black man to do your dirty work for you.

It is unfortunate that Mr. Steele cannot, or will not, see how he is being played.  All too often people are much too willing to let themselves be used if they can achieve some personal benefit in the process.  Mr. Steele could’ve used his new position to talk about how the Republicans will reach out to the black community like he did when he gave his two cents at the State of the Black Union.

Instead, he will use his position to attack a fellow black politician.  He applauds the bloc mentality of his Republican compatriots in the House of Representatives to deny the stimulus package Mr. Obama seeks to put America back on the economic tracks.  Mr. Steele speaks with the same selfish tone of Rush Limbaugh who said he hoped Mr. Obama fails in his attempts to turn the country around.  Better to wish people continue to suffer so someone can gloat rather than run the risk of having a political opponent offer lasting economic solutions.

True, Mr. Steele is probably just very passionate about his conservative principles.  He’s so coo-coo for conservatism that he’s willing to take up the mantle to attack the first black president.  Just imagine what Mr. Steele might be capable of if he was just half as passionate about the black community.  Chances are he wouldn’t have to convince anybody at the State of the Black Union of his black community affiliation.  It would be on his sleeve, kind of like his conservative principles.

It is an exciting time.  In a few hours the world will get its first United States President that is not a white male.  Barack Hussein Obama will be the first African American to serve as President of the United States.  It is an exciting time indeed.  The authorities estimate that as many as two million people will crowd into the small strip of open space known as the National Mall.  Some people are paying outrageous sums of good money and jumping through all kinds of flaming hoops so they can experience the event first hand even though more than likely they’d need a telescope with the optics of the Hubble to make out Mr. Obama’s person as he takes the oath on the steps of the United States Capitol Building.

A lot of people are asking the question what would Dr. King think of all this.  Truly, what would arguably the greatest symbol of the civil rights movement think?  What would the man who worked tirelessly for the black community think about a black politician achieving what for many is considered the highest political office in the land?  Not surprisingly, I see it as a simple question to answer.

When Dr. King instituted passive resistance against the raging institutionalized racism of America, there were a number of individual black Americans who were doing surprisingly well at the time.  People like Sidney Portier and Diane Carroll were making careers as Hollywood actors.  People like Redd Foxx and Bill Cosby were doing very well as comedians.  Berry Gordy and Earl Graves were making a name in the corporate world.  And a number of other black professionals were doing well as doctors and lawyers and whatever you may have had at the time.

But Dr. King wasn’t fighting for civil rights for a handful of black people.  His struggle was for the black community at large.  Mr. King never said that we needed a black president or a black corporate executive or the first black whatever.  Mr. King was fighting for the black community in general and not for that one black individual who has been able to overcome and reach their goals.

Thinking of Dr. King I am reminded of the story where he made a personal request to Nichelle Nichols who played Lieutenant Uhura on the then brand new science fiction phenomenon Star Trek.  For sometime, Ms. Nichols had felt that she was being mistreated by the show’s producers and wanted to quit the franchise.  When she had discovered that while other actors were enjoying their notoriety her fan mail was being withheld it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  She wanted to quit.  But Dr. King appealed to her saying that it would inspire future generations of black people to achieve.  Dr. Mae Jamison, the first black woman to go to space, admitted that it was Lieutenant Uhura at the futuristic switchboard of the Enterprise that inspired her to become an astronaut.

I’d like to imagine that Dr. King would be proud of Mr. Obama just as much as he would have been proud of any and every person of African decent who achieves and who wants to maintain their affiliation with the black community without selling their soul to do it.  The election of Mr. Obama to the presidency is a great achievement for him.  But the election of Mr. Obama is not tantamount to the evaporation of inequality.  Mr. Obama’s achievement is not the end all or be all of the black community.

A lot of people like to talk in the most simplistic of terms that Mr. Obama’s election is now an indication that racism is over and that the people in the black community no longer have an excuse for the under achievement that permeates the black community relative to other communities.  But then people turn around and see Mr. Obama as the rare exception instead of the general rule of black people.  He speaks so well.  Black people are indeed inferior.  It’s just that every now and then you will find that rare black person that can transcend his or her inherent black inferiorities.

Bottom line is that from Dr. King’s perspective, it wasn’t about the individual.  It wasn’t about the achievements of a few black people.  It was about the black community.  We can celebrate the fact that Mr. Obama is the latest member of an extremely small, elite fraternity.  We can support him in his endeavors as he tries to bring something that resembles respectable leadership back to the oval office.  The black community should be very proud of this moment.

But on the flipside, this is not a time to rest on laurels.  The proportion of education and employment opportunities for young black people falls short.  The only area when opportunities for black people excel relative to others is when we have an opportunity to fall under the harsh judgment of the public’s eye such as when we are brought before the judicial system or law enforcement.  And we still suffer from a mindset that when something negative is perpetrated by one black person, all black people suffer the consequences.  The whole fate of future black presidents rest on Mr. Obama’s broad shoulders.  However, the fate of future white presidents is hardly impacted by the less than stellar performance of George Bush.

And what does an Obama presidency hold for the black community?  Would he be a black president in the vein of Thurgood Marshall, the first black appointment to the Supreme Court?  Or is Mr. Obama’s relationship with the black community will be better defined in the vein of Clarence Thomas, Mr. Marshall’s less than illustrious successor?  Generally speaking will Mr. Obama be someone welcomed by the vast majority of black people who will judge as a good thing for everyone including the black community or will he be judged as an anathema heavily despised by black people?

Like most black people who have a vision and are more socially oriented, I imagine Dr. King would hope for the best for the entire community.  But he would not assume anything.  He would be proud, but he would stay vigilant.  He would say that this was a great achievement for a black man.  Obviously, the fact that a black man is becoming president is a sign that we have made significant progress.  But the fight for racial equality is far from over.  I believe Dr. King would know that we must continue this long and arduous journey resisting all manners of distractions along the way, even the distractions that would lead us to believe we have arrived when it’s really nothing more than the next logical step in a very long process.

If only this was always true. Unfortunately, history has a tendency to be written by the people in charge. For example, I find it rather disgusting that President Abraham Lincoln promoted himself as a racist. Mr. Lincoln was no man with sensitivity for black people and yet black people love him. He freed the slaves! Trust me, if Mr. Lincoln could have met his goals and keep black people as slaves, I’m sure he would’ve died a much happier man. Mr. Lincoln suffers from no stern judgment. And if it can happen for him, why can’t it happen for Mr. Bush?

I was rather appalled to hear the suggestion that the future would be much kinder to President George Bush. This man has wreaked havoc on the United States and the entire world. He will forever be linked to this second war on Iraq under the guise that the United States had the right to initiate preemptive wars against perceived yet totally unsubstantiated threats. We will find the weapons of mass destruction. We will chase Osama bin Laden through the gates of hell and around the flames of perdition until we find him. Mr. Hussein defied United Nation mandates and so the United States had to defy the United Nations in order to prove to the world that no one should be defying the United Nations. The reasons the Bush administration gave for promoting war is as long as the war itself.

Mr. Bush turned a blind eye to the suffering in New Orleans. The other day in his final press conference he held fast to his claim that the federal government moved quickly because the Coast Guard was there plucking people off the roofs of their houses during the storm. Because the local Coast Guard was unhampered by bureaucracy and didn’t get the memo that the lower part of Louisiana did not receive federal disaster area recognition and didn’t wait for approval to come through proper procedure in order to act, Mr. Bush wants to claim the actions of a few helicopters as indicative of a prompt, and it is implied sufficient, response by his administration to cover the lame effort put forth by FEMA. If I recall properly, Mr. Bush said heckuva job Brownie and not heckuva job Coast Guard.

Mr. Bush let oil companies define his energy policy and then looked surprised when those companies started making record profits earning as much as a billion dollars a week while the public suffered with paying four dollars a gallon for gasoline. Mr. Bush put people with sympathy for polluters in charge of the EPA.

Mr. Bush ignored the signs that a financial crisis was looming and instead stuck his head in the sand with claims that the foundation of the economy was strong. Plugging the hole that people were beginning to fall through when it was a relatively small problem never registered on Mr. Bush’s brain. We had to wait until large companies were failing before reacting. Mr. Bush enacted a policy of too big to fail, too small to help. By the time the government began to react, it was too late. A stitch in time would have saved a huge national collective headache. There is the Valerie Plame fiasco which could probably be summed up as No Spy Left Behind. And don’t forget how the Bush administration would manipulate science to deny doing anything about global warming or to fund any science that conducts research with stem cells from embryos.

There is a long list of Mr. Bush’s associates who have sulked away into obscurity, or soon will be. There’s Attorney General Roberto Gonzales, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, Chief Advisor to the Vice President I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a butt load of white house press secretaries, Julie Myers of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Christine Todd Whitman of the EPA, the former director of FEMA Michael “Brownie” Brown, Thomas White the former Interior Secretary, Elaine Chao the Secretary of Labor, Paul Wolfowitz the former Deputy of Defense Secretary, and the master king pin of all Karl Rove.

Mr. Bush points to his No Child Left Behind policy as one of his few successes. But for the past eight years the government has mandated that schools teach children to take a standardized test in order to compete for their funding instead of teaching children the three R’s. Mr. Bush likes to point to his drug policy for seniors as another success. Let’s see, we’re going to counter a war that has cost millions of lives and destroyed families and robbed our national treasury with the fact that our senior citizens no longer have to go to Canada to afford their prescriptions. Classic Bush.

When I initially heard Mr. Bush say that he will be vindicated by future historians I had to laugh to myself. Ain’t no way in hell people can forget the depth of this administration’s inclination to manipulate facts and distort truths. Nobody’s memory is that short. No history book’s pages fade that quickly. I held on to this notion for about a month or so.

But then I got an epiphany and I realized that there is very good potential that Mr. Bush could be remembered as one of the best presidents this country ever had. I heard a report that President-elect Barack Obama will be using a Christian bible that once belonged to Abraham Lincoln to take his inaugural oath. Mr. Obama will be delivering his inaugural address within sight of the Lincoln Memorial. For a while now, Mr. Obama admitted that he has been using the presidential policies of Abraham Lincoln as inspiration for his strategy for picking his cabinet by reaching out to his political opponents as well as by reaching across the political divide to the other party. Mr. Lincoln’s influence is all over Mr. Obama’s political image at this particular moment.

On the surface this will sound like a good thing to a lot of people. But Mr. Lincoln was no benevolent agent for the black community. While the black community has been trained to love Mr. Lincoln because he was the great white man that freed the slaves, Mr. Lincoln was also a racist and a bigot who felt no inclination to truly abolish slavery and make the black community whole. Mr. Lincoln admitted that he was never in favor of bringing about social and political equality between the white and black races. Mr. Lincoln said he would never support voting rights for black people. Mr. Lincoln was a good example of racism of his time. Yet, his reputation for racial compassion remains one of the greatest products of propaganda in America. This man’s character has been so thoroughly whitewashed that the majority of black people are more than happy to worship this man’s name. The first black president worships this man as well, a man who said he would rue the day that blacks and whites would be free to marry.

So if such a flip of the original script can happen for Mr. Lincoln, why can’t it happen for Mr. Bush as well? History is written by people who control the present. The history of today will be written by people who control the future. If the people who control the future think favorably of Mr. Bush they’ll put so much spin on the reputation of his presidency that a black hole couldn’t suck up all the lighting used to favorably distort his image. The stench of this presidency will be described as little more than the pleasing fragrance from a thorn free rose. Mr. Bush too can be whitewashed. Depending on who controls the future all it takes is time.

History may have a long range perspective that passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates people who fight for equality and the end to oppression. That’s a pretty thoughtful expression and one we’d all like to think holds a lot of water. Vindication sounds good. But another thoughtful expression that holds even more weight is the one that says those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.

Behavior economist Dan Ariely was explaining an experiment of learned helplessness conducted on two dogs during the fifties.  The first dog is put into a room by itself.  It hears a bell followed by an electric shock.  The dog has access to a switch.  The dog can use the switch to turn the electric shock off.  The dog learns that when it hears the bell to run and engage the switch to turn the electric shock off.  A second dog is put into the room by itself.  It hears a bell followed by an electric shock.  However, unlike the first dog, the second dog does not have a switch to turn the shock off.  The people conducting the experiment randomly turn the electric shock off.  But the dog is unable to equate any cause and affect principle to what is happening.  The dog learns that it is not in control of its environment.  The second dog is forced to learn helplessness.

The experiment continues.  The two dogs are put into the room together.  The bell rings and the first dog engage the switch while the other dog simply hunkers down and starts whimpering.  The experiment changes again.  The room is redesigned so that when the bell rings half the room is electrified while the other half is not.  The first dog learns that when it hears the bell it has to jump to the other side.  The second dog continues to do nothing but endure its torture.  The helplessness the second dog has learned is applied to other situations.

I’m pretty sure this experiment was conducted on relatively few dogs with only half the dogs getting the helplessness treatment while the other half remained pretty much normal.  And when the experiment was over, the dogs that received the treatment that inflicted them with their learned helplessness condition would have to go through a deprogramming process so that the damage done to their psyche could be undone so that the dogs would not spend the remainder of their lives dreading the sound of bells and reacting with the expectation of pain.  Something has to be done to make the dogs whole again.

I thought about this experiment and how it actually mimicked the helplessness imposed on our African ancestors who were brought to America to become white people’s slaves.  The institutionalized slavery of America was designed to impose a real sense of helplessness to the entire African population without exception.  Black people were publicly abused physically and spiritually and emotionally until they abandoned their African culture in favor of the new culture of subservience to white people.  This was the way of America for an entire population for generations to come.  And when slavery ceased to be a way of economic life, it was supplanted by institutionalized racism that was little different than its legal slavery counterpart.

Black people who have done the work necessary to take control of their lives by working hard at school or paying dues at the job are constantly rejected or bypassed or held back in favor of non black people who are believed to be better candidates if for no other reason than they are not the black candidate.  Case in point, Senator Barack Obama, who graduated from school at the very top of his class and top of his game, has to compete with Senator John McCain, a man who barely graduated coming in just six places from the bottom of his class of nearly nine hundred.  Why did Mr. McCain do so well against his black counterpart?  Regardless of what euphemism applied, the predominant reason for way too many people is that they were uncomfortable with the black man.

If Mr. Obama can have it so rough when he was obviously so above average, what chance does the average black person, or even the less than average black person, have?  It really is a hopeless situation to see black people having to struggle so hard just to be recognized.

Too many black people respond to this hopelessness by becoming as inert as the second dog.  And unlike the dog used in the experiment, there was nothing done to deprogram black people from the helplessness that was inflicted on the black community for generations.  Essentially, the dominant community thinks that all it has to do to make black people whole again is stop hanging black people from trees and pass a few civil rights laws that are easily subverted by claims of reverse discrimination.  Black people suffer the crappy end of every social measure.  But that’s just coincidental because no one is oppressing black people now, at least not as blatantly as the racially generic dominant community predominantly controlled by white people did in the past.

Just like many black people have learned the futility of doing anything to try and seize control of their own destiny, too many non blacks have learned the effectiveness of keeping black people from competing fairly in issues of economics and education.  The scientist who might experiment on a few dogs is not interested in a way of life to get ahead.  That’s probably why the scientist would take the time to make the dog whole again.  The dominant community, stuck on keeping the advantage of non black privilege, would never think to do anything to correct its infliction on the black community.

Of course Mike Duncan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee said that he was appalled by the song called Barack the Magic Negro distributed by Chip Saltsman. Set to the tune of the sixties Puff the Magic Dragon, the song first reached national attention when it was played on Rush “The Lush” Limbaugh’s radio show back in early 2007. The title was drawn from a Los Angeles Times column that suggested Mr. Obama appealed to those who feel guilty about the nation’s history of mistreatment of African-Americans.

Mr. Duncan said that the presidential election should have been a wakeup call for the Republican Party to reach out and bring more diversity to their virtually white only membership. Mr. Duncan claimed that he was shocked to think that anyone would find the parody appropriate. The fact that a candidate for the RNC chairmanship would stoop to such juvenile political humor is proof positive that not everyone in the Republican Party is serious about more inclusion.

Mr. Saltsman, a former chair of the Tennessee Republican Party, was a top advisor to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and managed former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign, sent other RNC members a CD which included the controversial tune about President-elect Barack Obama. Mr. Saltsman defended his actions Friday saying that the song was intended as a joke. Mr. Saltsman obviously has the same sense of humor as those white students back in Jena, Louisiana who thought hanging a noose under a tree was a good joke to play on black students. It was only after the manifestation of some of the worst racial disparity began to collect the nation’s attention with marches coordinated by members of the black community from every corner of the country did some people see that hanging nooses isn’t just fun and games but something to be taken seriously. Mr. Saltsman probably needs to learn the same lessons about his race tinged humor.

Now it just might be that Mr. Saltsman is a man who is sensitive to issues of race and just simply exercised poor judgment. But, there is the potential for this same poor judgment to apply to other issues of race as well. Mr. Saltsman already shows his willingness to play the race card. What chance would issues sensitive to the black community have with such a man in a position of high political importance? But black people are supposed to believe that the Republican Party stands ready to welcome us into their fold.

I remember the political race to the general election and the conservative rhetoric that Mr. Obama was an elitist out of touch with the reality of most Americans. Whether or not that statement is true or not is a matter of opinion. But it should be pretty obvious that people like Republican notables like Mr. Saltsman is a racial elitist who is out of touch with the reality of most black Americans.

In the current environment of social disparity that happens to fall along racial lines with black people falling short by every measure without a single exception, it should be no surprise to anyone of reasonable intelligence to recognize the need for racial sensitivity. Unfortunately, we see just the opposite. We see various Republican leadership wannabes attending their white only country clubs and living large with so many homes that they have to hire someone to research their property holdings. And when one of these high profile Republican members wants to play a joke, he stoops to racial discrimination. Next thing you know another member of the RNC wants to demonstrate how funny he can be by painting himself in black face and dancing a jig ala Al Jolson style. And when the man is busted for his foolishness, he’ll defend himself by saying it was a joke.

Unfortunately, over and over again, people in the Republican Party are quick to demonstrate that they have as much racial sensitivity and awareness as a rock. At least the rock has the good sense not to do anything that might be thoughtless or tacky. But the leadership of the Republican Party is not so astute. We are more likely to see a member of the Republican Party get on stage before his constituents and point to the only obvious racial minority in the group and happily refer to the attendee as macaca. We are more likely to see someone in the Republican Party say something stupid like black people who have lost everything in the world, including their loved ones, to a flood fueled by a hurricane as so fortunate to be housed in the Astrodome because they didn’t have jack before. There was a lot of sympathy for black people that day.

Yet, these are the types of people who represent the RNC. Is there any surprise that the number of black people we saw at the Republican National Convention could be counted on one’s fingers? The RNC is nothing but one huge, insensitive, hate filled, and racist joke with black people the subject. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so serious. Mr. Duncan wants to feign indignation and surprise with Mr. Saltsman’s latest manifestation that supports the Republican’s exclusive, white only mindset. But honestly, it appears to be nothing more than the standard GOP operating procedure.

I really, really tried last night.  But no matter how hard I tried to stay awake, the sandman would not be denied.  I fell asleep about nine Central Standard Time, about ninety minutes before Senator John McCain gave his concession speech.  I had fallen asleep on the couch and woke up to go to bed when I heard Mr. McCain’s voice.  I don’t remember exactly what he was saying, but I heard enough, he was conceding.  It registered on my sleepy brain that Mr. McCain, but I don’t think it registered that Mr. Obama won.

Ms. Peacemaker and I started tracking the polls about six thirty in the evening.  Mr. McCain was first on the board with eight votes to Senator Barack Obama’s three.  I think that was the last time Mr. McCain was in the lead.  At one point, the polls had Mr. Obama with about one hundred electoral votes to Mr. McCain’s thirty eight.  Mr. Obama pretty much was enjoying a two to one lead.

Now, I don’t know what officially makes a political landslide, but the 2008 election should be considered a prime example on the national scale.  But all night long the people monitoring the election claimed that the race was close and that Mr. Obama failed to flip some crucially needed traditionally Republican voting states.  When there were two hundred electoral votes for Mr. Obama and ninety for Mr. McCain, a few minutes before I lost consciousness, I figured all Mr. Obama needed was to win two more states, Florida with twenty seven votes and California with fifty five.  With consciousness quickly fleeing away I knew it was pretty much in the bag.  It was virtually impossible for Mr. McCain to overcome his more than a hundred vote deficit and pull off an upset.

Regardless, I woke up to an expected surprise!  The forty fourth president of the United States will be the first president who is not known as a hundred percent Caucasoid male.  President Barack Obama will be the first visible minority president.  More than two hundred and thirty years after the birth of our nation we finally have a little racial variety in our highest executive office.  The historic nature of the occasion is monumental.

But then again, the challenges ahead of him and the rest of America are truly monumental.  No president has ever come into this office facing the variety of problems that await Mr. Obama.  Yes we may have had a president that had to face a great depression early in the twentieth century.  Yes we may have had presidents that had to guide the country through wars.  But now we have an economic crisis of its own monumental proportions, a war fueled by differences in ideologies in two countries, a healthcare crisis with so many Americans losing everything including their lives, global competition as well as global animosity for the previous administration’s unilateral global policies, and so much more.  We voted for the black man to lead the country after the last white man screwed it up so royally.

Voting for Mr. Obama is only the first step.  He is not a dictator of a nation but a leader.  His predecessor, President George Bush, was at one time fond of saying that he is the decider who controls the fate of this country.  But if this election has done anything it has drilled home the fact that it is the collective people of America that are the deciders of this country.  The president might feel like he, or surely one day she, can operate with personal impunity, but he leaves the rest of his or her party to face retribution.  It wasn’t Mr. Obama who was the greatest contributor to the defeat of Mr. McCain but Mr. McCain’s association with an immensely unpopular president who explicitly and implicitly said that he didn’t give a shit about what the American public thought.

Mr. Obama goes into the presidency with the momentum of the world behind his back.  This great victory was achieved with a great deal of effort and coordination of people around the nation.  Mr. Obama cannot do it all alone.  He needs the help of the American people and he needs to stay accountable to the American people.  A lot of people supported Mr. Obama because they felt he was truly the best man for the job.  But on the other hand, there are a lot of other people who voted for Mr. Obama simply because we felt he was the lesser of evils.

If anything can be learned from the story of George Bush it is that the support Mr. Obama may enjoy today can evaporate quicker than a snowball in the hottest pit of hell.  He needs to remain focused and he needs to remember who he serves.  It was the people who donated the most to his political effort.  A lot of people wanted to see change.  Business as usual is not an option.  Two years from now there will be another national election and the Democratic Party that is firmly in charge of the legislature and the executive branch will be held accountable.  I strongly suggest that he, nor anyone else in politics, doesn’t continue the tradition of taking the people for granted.